


Obiectum

by hujgup



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Developing Relationship, F/M, Inanimate Transformation, Transformation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-06
Updated: 2013-12-06
Packaged: 2018-01-03 15:08:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1071913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hujgup/pseuds/hujgup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat Vantas is a transmogrifier, along with all other lowbloods – his body has the ability to change forms. He cannot activate this ability, however – only a highblood that has been psionically linked to them can. Thus, a system has emerged where lowbloods are assigned to highbloods, to be used as and when they wish. They lose their status as trolls and become the property of the other.</p><p>Today is the day of his assignment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Obiectum

**Author's Note:**

> Oh look, it’s the third story I’ve written that has Karkat as a main. He’s just so fun to write, okay?
> 
> AU semantics: adult trolls don't necessarily leave Alternia, all highbloods have some level of psionic ability (though not always enough to affect anything without outside assistance), and the 12 A2 trolls don't yet know each other.
> 
> So this story basically came to me in a massive wave all at once after I started wondering to myself why there wasn't any inanimate TF stories on AO3. If you're just here for the Explicit tag, that stuff comes in a later chapter, and when it gets released I'll update this note with what chapter it appears in. If not, and you're just interested in the premise, let's begin.
> 
> Also, pro tip for those of you who can never think of titles: take your working title and translate it into Latin. It makes it look like you put thought into it.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Troll Arthur C. Clarke

\-----

Your name is Karkat Vantas and today is the day of your assignment.

You never really thought you’d get this far, to be honest with yourself. You expected your mutation to get you culled upon inspection, but you suspect the troll who surveyed you was very slightly intoxicated - or, to put it another way, they were completely and utterly out of it. In some respects, however, you were somewhat hoping they would cull you. You are a transmogrifier, the same as all others below Jade on the hemospectrum. This trait is passive and inaccessible to you, but a few thousand sweeps ago a blue-blooded robotics expert known to history only as Executor Darkleer discovered a way to control this power through the use of a proxy. You don’t know the details exactly, but you’re pretty sure the nanobots the inspector injected act as some sort of psionic signal receiver, activating your ability. Naturally, this being Alternia, the proxy became a highblood, instead of the intended signal-bouncer. Thus the process of Anchoring was born. Any teal-blood or above could broadcast a signal to the implanted nanobots of an assigned transmogrifier, activating the ability for their own gain and often against the TM’s will. This assignment is every lowblood’s destiny from the moment they hatch.

You’re in a room with all the other assignees from your district that were collected on this pass. None of you have any place to sit, although this doesn’t surprise you in any way whatsoever. Aside from the fact that this is merely a holding area, who would they waste perfectly good furniture on trolls of your status, most of who would leave here as less than trolls in the eyes of the law? Upon assignment, the transmogrifier loses any and all rights they had – from that point forwards, their lives are dictated by their Anchor, who becomes their legal owner. The thought of this is repulsive to you, but there’s fuck all you can do about it - so, like everyone else, you try to ignore it.

After a time a crackle comes over a loudspeaker and the ambient chatter dies down. A female voice comes through and says “TMs will prepare for evaluation.” Everyone, including yourself, line up in broken symmetric rows and stand absolutely still, as the instructional video previously shown to you all en masse demonstrated. Once everyone is lined up and still, the ceiling shimmers and becomes transparent, revealing a room above the one you stand in: potential Anchors meander above you, inspecting any TM that catches their eye. The room is filled completely with violet-blooded seadwellers, as you expected – the higher-bloods get first pick of everything else, after all. One raises their head and says a word you don’t catch through the sound-proofed glass. The loudspeaker voice says “68”, and a male bronze-blood with that number embedded onto the fabric of their clothing stands rigid and, after a second, steps out of the line-up and through a door opposite to the one you all entered through, as the film showed. The loudspeaker once again comes on, this time saying “342” – things are starting to move too fast to follow. One by one, those called out file out of the room to synchronize with their Anchor. Indigo-bloods enter the observation area after all the violets have their picks, then blues, then cerulean. The room gradually empties, and those remaining begin to get nervous again – any who are not chosen are sent to work in dangerous jobs such as off-world mining operations for the rest of their lives or, worse yet, used as an organ farm for highbloods who require transplants. You shudder at the thought and, even though many parts of your brain are telling you that it’s stupid, pray that one of the teals will choose you.

The final batch of highbloods enter the observatory and the standard process continues. Trolls file out one-by-one, slower than before, and you begin to think that your fate is sealed, until the loudspeaker calls out your number: “612”. This startles you and makes you jump, but you quickly regain "composure" and walk to the exit. Pushing open the door, you follow the corridor up to the synchronization annex, the place where you’ll meet the troll that will own you for the rest of your miserable, pathetic life. The door to the annex opens automatically and there, holding up a sign with your number on it, is your Anchor. She somewhat overenthusiastically grins at you and waves, signaling you over. As you move to her, you take in her appearance. She’s wearing standard dress – a black shirt embedded with her symbol, which looks somewhat like someone’s punctured a sphere and laid out the edges along a flat strip. What’s not so standard are her startling pointed red glasses, coloured so densely you wonder how she manages to see through them. She’s grinning wide at you, showing you all of her perfectly-kept razor-sharp incisors, and despite the fact that those teeth could easily tear you open, for some reason you find the gesture innocuous.

You’re so busy pondering that you forget to stop once you reach her – you quickly slam on the brakes, almost making the potentially fatal mistake of walking straight into her and knocking her over. You don’t know what you would have done then – she’d have probably sent you away to the mines.

“Hi”, she says plainly, casually throwing the sign behind her. Odd – after the massive grin she gave you expected something a bit more than that. You aren’t stupid enough to tell her that, though, so you say nothing. “Well are you gonna say anything, or should I send back for a more lively one?” she says.  
“Uh-“ you stammer out, “I was, uh, waiting for permission to speak.”  
“Liar,” she says, pointing an outstretched finger at your face. “The court finds you guilty of misdirection and sentences you to a lifetime assignment to the honorable prosexecutioner.”  
“You do understand that you are embarrassing nobody but yourself, right?” you reply.  
“But it’s more fun this way.”  
“Fine, go around pretending you’re a legislacerator. I’m sure that nobody will ever look at you funny and that all your peers will respect you for who you ar-” oh god did you really just say all that to your Anchor? Stupid, stupid stupid! You cringe; there’s no way she’s gonna-  
“Hehehehe! That’s more like it! she says, surprising you completely. “Come now, we shall assign you with the aide of the honorable synchronizer whose name currently escapes this courtblock.” Of course you get stuck with the weird one. Then again, it’s likely that no other person would have tolerated that outburst, so perhaps it’s for the best. You cautiously approach the synchronization matrix and a woman tells you in monotone to place your head in one end of the machine. She instructs your Anchor to do the same on the opposite side. You consider running away, punching the synchronizer and legging it out, but then you realize it’s much too late for that – beyond the inevitable security response, you have no clue where the exit might be. So you do as instructed, waiting for it to happen, and for your status as an independent entity to be stripped. The syncer presses a button on the flanking edge of the machine and asks your Anchor to emit some psionic energy. You don’t see or feel any difference, but the machine appears to register it regardless. The syncer taps a few more buttons and then informs you that the process is complete.  
“Is that it? I was expecting somewhat more fanfare,” your Anchor says. The syncer says nothing, but does roll her eyes and motions you both to remove your heads from the machine. Immediately your Anchor grabs you by the arm, pulls you towards her, stretches her other arm out and, while pointing, says to you completely un-ironically: “Come, our destiny awaits!”

She lurches forwards and drags you behind her as you struggle to keep your footing. She pushed open a door, once again opposite the one you entered through, and enters a communal area that’s much larger than the selection room. Anchors and Assignees are all together - some transformed, some not – this is most probably an area designed to help Anchors become used to manipulating their TMs. Most of the higher-bloods are missing, having already finished learning how to control the transformation process, but a small number of blue-bloods still remain. Your Anchor laughs excitedly and drags you towards the nearest free space. She sits on the floor, dragging you down with her, and you end up in an undignified heap of flailing limbs. She laughs again, and you have a feeling that you’re going to have to get used to that sound.

As you right yourself and brush off your pants, you start feeling a tingle in your mind. Instinctively, you know she’s trying to access you, to initiate a process that, judging by your guess as to her age, she’s never done before. You don’t know whether the mental incursion is supposed to be this fluid at first or if that’s a skill that’s meant to be learned, but for some reason the psionic energy in your think pan feels paradoxically nice, like taking a dip in an Ablution Trap. Similarly fluid-feeling is the changes the psionics are inducing in your body. You’ve become semi-liquid, behaving like a fluid in all respects bar one – you aren’t taking the shape of a container. Instead the fluid you’re becoming seems electrically charged, and thus able to be directed by magnetic fields. Perhaps this is where the skill comes in – the manipulation of those fields by your Anchor to mould you into the device they desire you to be. Another pulse of psionics causes you to change colour to the same shade of teal as her symbol – another mark of her complete control over you. You feel your liquid form developing a hole in the middle, splitting outwards but shrinking at the same time as you become smaller and more rounded, shedding your clothing that’s now not only much too big for you, but shaped improperly as well. The presence in your mind withdraws itself and you fuse back into a solid, although not the same solid as your body was.

You’re semi-metallic and somewhat ring-shaped, although the circle is far from perfect – you have imperfections, bumps and grooves all over your surface. You still have some of your senses – you can see, hear and feel the floor beneath you, but you can also see above you. Being used to a normal field-of-vision, this complete 360 degree view of the world is disorienting to you, and you barely recognize the shape of a grey hand reaching down towards you before it picks you up. The light is mostly cut off and you feel your Anchor’s cold hand all around you, confining you in its embrace.  
“So I think it’s time to introduce myself,” she says to you as she opens her palm – you're just able make out her giant face as your pan begins to decipher known objects and adjust your new optical perception accordingly. “My name is Terezi Pyrope, and that was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

She probes your mind again, but this time she provides no magnetic input – the liquid fills in the hole in your center and expands outwards, returning you to your original, default form (telling you that your mind is in fact capable of psionics, but only subconsciously), complete with a new set of clothes. Unlike your old ones, however, you have a feeling these clothes are parts of you – you can not only feel your skin against them, but them against your skin. You look towards your Anchor, who you now know as Terezi, and she’s grinning that same grin you saw in the synchronization annex. You climb off her, having retained the same position as you were in before your shift back, and she closes her mouth and tilts her head.  
“What’s your name?” she asks you.  
“Karkat Vantas,” you say grumpily, making a point to not make eye contact with her. You don’t know why she would care what your name is – she does own you now, after all; she could give you any name she wished and you’d just have to lie down and accept it.  
“Nice to meet you Karkat!” she says, the grin returning once again. “I’m impressed with what you did there, you know.”  
You sigh: “What you did there,” you correct her.  
“No, stupid, the thing in general, not the outcome! The liquid thing, the fact that that’s all possible – it’s amazing.”  
“Yeah, I guess. I mean, it’s not worth being owned like a fucking pet for.”

She looks at you with what must be mock-concern, the beginning of a convoluted plan to subdue you. You decide to cut the bullshit and get on with it.

 “Try again?” you ask her, your voice passive.  
“Okay. Let’s try again.”

And so it continues, Terezi practicing field manipulation and structural changes while you simply allow yourself to "relax" in the sensations.  Once, before you shift back to reset and try again, you try to speak, but find that you can’t. Similarly, later on you discover that your forms are immobile, although this doesn’t surprise you in the least – they don’t have any muscles, after all.

After what could be 50 tries, she gets it – she gets you in the form she’s been imagining. You’re a teal ring, circular both on your inner and outer edges, just the right size to fit on her index finger. She slips you on, pushing you past the knuckle. The temperature differential takes a bit of getting used to, but soon you stop feeling it, the metal’s latent heat dissipating into her. She’s grinning again – you can see it in the “corner” of your vision - and you can tell she’s proud of herself. She stands up and walks down through the gaps between Anchor and Assignee pairs towards a stack of books by a door.

Surveying the scene, you can see that the room’s markedly emptier than it was when you entered. Only a few ceruleans remain, and the last blue-blood is making their way out the same door you’re headed to, picking up one of the books on the way out. After a time Terezi reaches the stack and picks one up; you catch a glimpse of the title – “Your New Transmogrifier: A Beginner’s Guide” – and she pushes on the door, out into the transportation bay.  
“Well Karkat, we’re headed to my hive and your new home. I hope you like it because I’m certainly not moving from it anytime soon!” She hops onto a communal momentum enhancer and sits down in one of the seats – she opens up the book, you still on her finger, and on the trip to the station near her hive she periodically reads some of it over. During the pauses in her reading she looks down and just stares at you on her finger – smiling while she does so, not grinning.  
“I’ve looked forward to this day for a long time, possibly since I was just a wriggler,” she tells you, “but when it arrived I was uncertain whether the reality was going to live up to my fantasies. I’m glad I wasn’t disappointed.”

You don’t want to think about what would’ve happened to you if she was, but at the same time you don’t really want to think about what’s going to happen to you now. You try to ignore the world outside of your mind and attempt to drift off to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> "Communal momentum enhancer" is the troll word for train.


End file.
